You are twelve years old. You start getting good at something: school. It’s like a game; the better you do, the more pressure there is to keep doing well. Eventually this pressure becomes a cloak you wear, or another layer of skin. It’s always written in glaring letters in your mind; you can’t blink it away. You succumb to it, but it doesn’t really feel like giving in. You chase the feeling until it is you, and you are it. You come to expect congratulations; at some point you develop a hollow feeling when you aren’t complimented. You are everything adults love and everything they expect you to be, now that you’ve proved yourself. You are lonely, but what does that matter? A little voice buried under a million louder voices tells you to set the books aside; don’t you wish you were out there playing with them? What’s that twinge of hurt you feel when they look at you slightly differently: you don’t belong with us anymore; no, you can’t be in the picture. You don’t even have social media, barely understand what it is. You walk alone, reminding yourself you are better off this way. It’s hard to tell when, but at some point there is an imperceptible shift inside you. Because you hold yourself to the highest degree of self-awareness, you acknowledge the line you think is in the Bible: “We are afraid we will not be accepted. We are afraid we will not be loved.” Everybody feels that way, except your books have failed you because they look so happy in that group standing over there. But the first small thread has been loosened and now you feel the whole thing starting to fall apart. You panic; you feel the panic physically in every cell of your body. Your delicate, uninfluenced, pure existence is ending. You built it and now you are breaking it.

You learn to see yourself like they see you. You learn how to put on mascara. You learn not to eat too much, because you should be skinnier. Every time you stare out the window, you wish you were somewhere else. You see things that aren’t there, little villages of dwarves and huge castles that don’t exist. You try to escape to one of them but it doesn’t work anymore. You find the same sweatshirts and jeans they wear and spend all the money in your account on them. You throw out a heap of your long, smooth, embroidered dresses and find short ones online and start wearing them. You get your hair straightened. Your voice changes. Your “yes”s turn to yeaahs, lilting and unsure and insecure. The years go by faster. Your life is no longer a limitless map of clear, bright mysteries. Leftover fragments of your old life feel like foreign objects in your hands: your Harry Potter books, your inflated sense of self, an old watch you find, a T-shirt from the Boston Aquarium. You miss the girl who did the puzzles in the books and missed subway stops because she was so deeply lost in her own head. Now when you read on the subway, you can hear your stop, and you get off, and you’re a little sad.